Virtues and Rights

 The West in both its classical and Christian heritage had a strong sense of virtues, of the cultivation of the character.  Today the moulding of one’s personal character to develop personal virtues has been replaced by an emphasis on rights.  People either guard their rights jealously or actively campaign for more rights.  One’s own character is valued according to one’s tolerance of the rights of others and it seems all other virtues are forgotten, perhaps regarded as patriarchal.

If we go back to Aristotle, the most important thinker in terms of virtue ethics, he understood the acquiring of virtues to be the human’s telos.  Just as a lyre is made to be played so a man exists to acquire the virtues.  In acquiring those virtues men attain true happiness, not the hedonism of the Enlightenment utilitarians, but eudaimonia - the good spirit, a type of happiness of superior quality, like Christian joy being a more elevated form of happiness, linked to one’s purpose and to meaning.  The shaping or honing of the character in Aristotle’s thinking led to the acquiring of habits, good habits and these good habits were the virtues.

Aristotle would be a major influence on the Christian theologian, the Scholastic Thomas Aquinas.  For Aristotle the virtues included courage, temperance, magnificence, friendship, truthfulness, justice, friendliness, and phronesis or prudence, which in some sense governed the exercise of the other virtues,.  .

For Aquinas there were the theological virtues of faith, hope and love and the cardinal virtues - prudence, temperance, courage and justice.  These are not exhaustive lists of the virtues, but give a picture of the many virtues Man has to hone to develop his character.

With the Renaissance and the Enlightenment a different emphasis on virtue developed.  Machiavelli wrote about virtu, meaning the use of virtues as a means to a political end.  It was a return to a different aspect of the classical heritage, virtue as power and excellence.  This was a major departure, the consequence of the action rather than its moral quality was what counted.  It was the idea of the ends justifying the means and for Machiavelli his idea of virtue was more about excellence in power than either the Aristotlian or Christian ideas of the good for its own sake.  The Enlightenment further lost touch with ideas of virtue due to its reductive tendencies.  Material happiness and political freedom achieved by self- interested individuals was more of the emphasis rather than the development of personal character.  In England in particular with the development of utilitarianism there was a real loss of a sense of virtue as a goal of its own.  As ever J S Mill tried to mitigate the excesses of Bentham’s theories, but inevitably the emphasis was more one of individual liberty rather than virtue.  Hedonism was the inevitable result.

Again contrary to virtue and the utilitarians, the Enlightenment Colossus Immanuel Kant completely placed the emphasis on duty and the moral aspect of the action regardless of eudaimonia or social consequences.  This deontological approach is suspicious of happiness deriving from doing the right thing.  For the virtue ethicist we attain eudaimonia, a higher, more true happiness by fulfilling our purpose of virtue.  For Kant deriving pleasure from a righteous act discredits our reason for fulfilling the duty because we act out of self interest.  Thus virtue ethics now found itself between two Enlightenment ethical theories - utilitarianism emphasising the greatest happiness for the greatest number even by questionable means - so-called consequentialism and by contrast Kant’s deontology that only gave moral status to completely disinterested actions regardless of consequences.

The Enlightenment, for all its claims of its supposed victory (still believed by thinkers such as Steven Pinker) has long been in intellectual trouble.  It has revealed its innate tendencies to reduction, narrow rationalism, infatuation with science, modernity and progress, a moral and cosmological meaninglessness and hidden revolutionary aims.  Nietzsche exposed the Enlightenment and advocated a sort of exuberant nihilism where will to power was the new value.  But there was also another alternative - modern virtue ethics.  

In the Twentieth Century thinkers such as Elizabeth Ascombe resurrected interest in the long-forgotten pre-Enlightenment theory of ethics.  Roman Catholic thinker Alasdair MacIntyre, in his work On Virtue, dismantled Enlightenment assumptions to reveal their inevitable tendency to Nietzschean will to power and then presented the alternative of living virtuously, by which we attain the happiness of eudaimonia.

In popular contemporary life however, despite the great strides in the academic world made by virtue ethicists, virtue is rarely discussed.  Post-modernism with its Leftist interpretation of Nietzsche, has made far more of an impression.  Rather than live virtuously we can attain meaning by either engaging in hedonism or fighting the patriarchy.  

If we understand the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as a picking apart of what was believed by everyone, everywhere, at all times - what we might call the Tradition- then we have finally ended up in the total subversion and chaos of post-modernism.  In addition, with the utilitarians we think hedonism or pleasure to be the meaning of life.  If we think more broadly than that then our idea of the virtue of justice is not Scholastic righteous indignation, but more about promoting the freedom of others to engage in ever more subversive forms of pleasure and hedonism. 

There is some hope.  The rise of figures such as Jordan Peterson, who have challenged the woke revolutionaries and post modernism, arguing it is better to sort out your own life rather than try to change society have been welcome.  Nonetheless, there is still not a general return to a culture of virtue on the whole.

For the sake of our civilisation there must be a shift from the language of rights to the language of virtues.  Righteous indignation being expressed on behalf of the most depraved forms of hedonism is not virtuous.  Virtue must be about the development of character, not self indulgence and narcissistic infatuation with our identities.

Courage is a virtue noticeably absent from our culture.  The cowardly woke virtual- mob, hidden behind avatars throw around accusations of wrong-think and anyone who expressed an opinion once commonly held but not woke collapses and retracts.  Everywhere there is moral cowardice in the face of a capricious and self indulgent movement of hedonistic rights-focused revolutionaries.  

If we had honed character, if we had developed the virtue of courage in particular, but all the other virtues as well, then our society would be far more healthy and those extremists now running the agenda, indulged by our left-wing establishments and facing no real opposition however ridiculous and harmful their goals would instead not have been able to get going in the same way.

Sober men, finding personal reward through eudaimonia in developing the strength of character to be wise, courageous and truthful could have stood up to the insanity of the last decade or so.  Instead we have seen only pusillanimity on the part of those who should have resisted.  

Only with a return to virtue will there be a society strong enough to hold the lunatics back and to prevent the self-harming agendas of our political elites.  For several hundred years the West has been abandoning the development of character through virtue, we are now reaping the consequences.

The Legacy of the Second World War - Globalist Liberalism

 The Second World War saw the victory of the liberal United States and the Communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Most of the fighting was on the Eastern Front and the Communists essentially defeated Nazi Germany, to the benefit also of the USA (which also fought alongside the British Empire on the Western Front and against Japan).  The USA meanwhile defeated Imperial Japan by being the only country to use the atom bomb (twice).  The end of the war meant a new geopolitical settlement. In Eastern Europe and Russia this meant the temporary hegemony of the Communists over Eastern European countries and in the West the seemingly permanent hegemony of liberalism, with the British Empire defenestrated by the USA and the resurgent Germans reduced to a NATO colony.  

For the West there were important cultural and political consequences.  By allying with the Communists political liberalism and international capital secured their dominance in the West  intellectually and economically.  The CIA through Project Long Leash and MK Ultra, sought to shape the West as ultra-liberal, sexually open and culturally avant garde, thereby contrasting it in propaganda terms with Soviet conservatism.  Before World War Two, Communism had been associated with gender and sexual liberalism, but to save the USSR from the Nazi threat, Stalin realised the cohesiveness of social conservatism was vital.  The Cold War was different, to dismantle the Soviet Empire, the Western establishment decided Western culture should be dismantled too via the sixties cultural revolution with the aim that atomised individualism would infect the Eastern Bloc.  

Lying behind this also was the victory of the post modernists in the Academy such as Derrida and Foucault, who were setting about a cultural revolution from the Left in their rejection of Stalin’s conservative Communism and orthodox Marxism.  So-called Cultural Marxism and Post Modernism were used to reject Marxist structuralism and instead to introduce a chaotic meaninglessness, where all meaning, conservative or Marxist was seen as oppressive phallogocentrism.  Heidegger was deliberately revised to justify Derrida’s decontructionism.  The West became the champion of revolutionary social disintegration.  The spirit of 1968 won out over the Gaullist nationalism that could have been a genuine alternative to American liberalism, Soviet Communism and defeated European Fascism.

The CIA sponsored abstract art and the use of psychedelic drugs to transform Western society into a revolutionary and individualistic society.  The West reinvented itself as the anti-Fascist civilisation, whereby all taboos were regarded as nascent Fascism.  Behind this deconstructionism was not only Derrida, but the writings of Adorno, who in his Fascist Personality linked the existence of sexual taboos and sexual suppression to the causes of Fascism.  

As a result the West set fire to its heritage of virtues and ethics in favour of  a return to Weimar degeneracy.  Any form of authority was rejected as Fascist, by the Twenty-First Century it was to become impossible in the West to discriminate between virtue and vice as the trajectory reached its extreme.  This was always there in Western philosophy, but victory in the Second World War led to a hyper-liberalism and a consequent social breakdown, with broken families, homosexuality, sexually-transmitted diseases, single parenthood and an all-pervasive anomie.  Finally we now see gender dysphoria normalised and the masculine rejected as evil.

These are the consequences of a sort of runaway revolutionary liberalism drunk on its defeat of Nazism.  There is a blindness here.  First not to realise that such Weimar-style degeneracy causes a reaction in the form of a more authoritarian politics,  Secondly, much as the modern Westerner would hate to admit it, Nazism with its social Darwinism, its eugenics in the camps and its focus on technological advance was the other face of Western modernity, not a return to pre-Enlightenment tradition.  Nazism too was a creature of the Enlightenment.  When  all hierarchical values and God are rejected then Nazism becomes conceptually possible.  Practically the West would benefit from Nazi science and would recruit Nazi scientists after the War.  Morally there was little difference between Nazi eugenics and the aims of establishment liberals in the West such as H G Wells.  The Nazis did their eugenicist dirty work for them.  The fruit of the scientific knowledge gained  therefore could then be consumed by the West, as a result of Nazis violating all normative and Christian morality.

Today the Nazi focus on eugenics is still being tacitly implemented, but disguised with the language of rights and individual autonomy, be that with abortion or assisted suicide.  The Nazis conveniently did the research for the West on a range of scientific obsessions.

Contrary to the claims of the West there is far more in common with the social Darwinism of Nazism and our own disregard for the sanctity of life today.  The key propaganda ingredient is the language of consent and rights, but the end result is people who are weak and infirm or are defenceless babies are still being killed.

Nonetheless, the political language about the “patriarchy” or racist oppression is all linked to the Second World War and the fight against Fascism.  It means that oppression and authoritarianism are detected in any attempt to defend virtue or objective morality or even sanity as ideas about gender differences or protecting ourselves from mass-migration are seen as Fascist.  Normal debate becomes impossible as all is defined in a hysterical way within the Second-World-War paradigm.  

Jonathan Pageau, Orthodox intellectual and icon carver recently published a video in which he discussed the way our world is defined by the myth of the Second World War (to be found herehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vstNGNtl-B4).  He discusses the deep symbolism of the Holocaust and the way we interpret the dropping of the atom bomb as well as the way the image of Hitler is used as a political insult in politics.  He also touches on how the narrative of Churchill refusing to appease the tyrant has been used in every post- war conflict.

For example, with its unipolar moment after the fall of the other post-war victor the USSR, the USA used the moral claims of victory over the Nazis to justify an expansionist and violent foreign policy under the names of liberal interventionism and neoconservatism.  Perhaps the consequences were foreseen, but apart from the massive number of deaths of civilians in “democratised” countries and the consequent growing of Islamist extremism, this policy also caused the migrant crisis which will eventually further weaken Europe and if Russia can be reduced mean the continent becomes a vassal of the United States.

Another foreign policy consequence has been the unquestioning support for Israel even at risk of our people’s interests.  While Russia is condemned by the West in the Ukraine, a policy of full-scale slaughter by Israel, to which Russian intervention cannot be seen as a moral equivalent, is permitted with impunity.  The whole mythos of the Second World War makes it impossible to criticise Israel and what criticism there is has been sidelined and syphoned off to the extreme Left, thereby discrediting any conservative criticism by association.  

Jonathan Pageau’s claim that we can only understand our world in the context of a mythos about World War Two that hides the bad faith of allying with an equally horrific ideology in the form of Stalinist Russia is therefore true.  Furthermore the victory of the so-called cultural Marxists from Marcuse to Adorno (who actually rejected true Marxism) is linked to the rejection of any concept of moral or political authority and this position is consequent upon anti-fascist propaganda.  But this has not led to freedom.  Instead we have found ourselves governed by the victors of the Second World War - global finance and the Wilsonian advocates of global governance.  These technocratic globalist institutions are anti-fascist and define the term broadly.  From the UN to the WEF a progressive agenda is promoted that very much has come to be at odds with the democratic wishes of American and European populations.  Whether Trump, Brexit or the various right-wing parties in the European continent such as the ADF and National Rally there is a struggle for power between the demos attracted to populists who resist the globalists and the globalist technocrats who detect within any opposition the stirrings of Fascism.

And related to all of this is the situation in the Ukraine.   This is both an old-fashioned geopolitical struggle and also an ideological one.  To become part of the US empire the Ukraine must abandon any form of conservatism, throw away its Orthodox religious faith and embrace LGBT and woke ideas.  Russia meanwhile is painted as fascist (ironically the very country that defeated Fascism and for which that victory defines its identity).  Its move into the ethnically Russian areas of the Donbas is painted as a re-run of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland.  While literal Nazis fight the Russians and local military groups, the Western propaganda paints it as another battle against Fascism.  Because Russia still maintains some traditional values it is categorised within the nebulous definition of Fascist and as an enemy of all the modern West stands for - open borders, no sexual borders and a rejection of any populist-democratic will (Zelensky unlike Putin - who won resoundingly - cancelled elections and now rules with no democratic mandate).  Democratic opinion is supposed to be part of the New World Order, but only if it produces the answer the technocrats favour (see Romania and Georgia).  Otherwise it is dismissed as populism, which we are told is the first step towards Fascism.

In the end we must understand who won the Second World War.  Not the British Empire.  Not the nation state.  It was rather a global network of international finance and liberal internationalist political actors allied as a matter of convenience with Stalinist Russia.   These groups have their own agendas favoured by the breakdown of traditional values and traditional social groups.  Since the War this agenda has been implemented as an aggressive policy that has been implemented without democratic support.  Any successful resistance to this unaccountable agenda that has caused such misery and anomie and broken lives must again re-establish ideas of authority, virtue, borders in morals and countries, orientation towards the transcendent and a rejection of enslaving hedonism and atomistic individualism.